


The Man You Take Me For

by scioscribe



Category: Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-19
Updated: 2013-01-19
Packaged: 2017-11-26 02:23:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/645499
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He says, "I have made mistakes."</p><p>Javert looks at him.  Javert, he thinks, can fathom neither mistakes nor regret.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Man You Take Me For

The man who goes to prison in his place—

Monsieur le Maire tells himself that he can learn to think of that man as Jean Valjean.

_What I lose is nothing. Only a name. Even if it is whatever name would be written in the Book of Life._

There is actual life to think of. Would the footfalls still echo on his factory floor without him there to open the doors in the morning? Would women go home to their families with their wages tucked into handkerchiefs without him to have granted them? He touches dozens of lives as Monsieur le Maire; his influence is a stone thrown into a still pool. The man who would be Jean Valjean is one man. By such arithmetic does he convince himself, though it is of little enough help when he wakes in the middle of the night and, Madeleine stripped away by dreams of Toulon, is only one man himself.

And now he has no name. He has forfeited all right to self.

He learned, once, to live without a name. It is easier to learn the second time around.

He wraps the candlesticks carefully in cloth and packs them away in a chest. The gap on his table is hard to bear, but it is one more absence he can grow accustomed to, one more lack; it is the reminder of grace that would madden him one way or another. He cannot afford the selfishness of conscience now. If he sinks, if he loses, if he fails—if the weight of his stone in the pool drags others under instead of creating ripples to wash them ashore—then everything was for nothing.

*

Cosette looks like sunlight shining through frost. If he were a different man, he would believe that she augurs hope for some kind of thaw. But she sits on his knee, she plays with the china-faced dolls he buys her, she licks her spoon after dessert. She is solid, Fantine’s child, and entirely real. He cannot make her over into his dream of redemption and he does not deserve her as she is.

And she deserves a far better guardian.

“I thought you were going to be my papa,” she says.

“I will always be your papa,” he says, though he hopes she will forget him. He settles her hand against his heart. “You will always be here, for me.”

“I won’t,” she says. “I’ll be where you’re sending me.”

“Cosette, the convent school is an excellent place to grow up.”

She lifts her chin. “But it’s a place without you.”

He kisses her cheeks and forehead. Places without him, he’s coming to think, are the best places, and certainly the only ones that will keep her safe. If she is the coming spring, the ray of sun that warms the green and welcomes it back to the world, he is the flood that drowns the plain. He does not deserve the way she looks at him. Guilt is a millstone around his neck that forces his head down, that breaks any attempt he might make to look her in the eye.

*

Javert comes in the next day with a small wooden elephant in one hand. He looks about the factory.

“I sent her away,” Madeleine says. The whole truth of it is in that one sentence, but he adds, for Javert’s sake, “To the convent school. I came to believe I was not a man to raise a child alone.”

“I see,” Javert says. He puts the elephant down on the table. The elephant is painted all over the color of pale ivory, with blue and red straps of cloth harnessing it, a little cheap gaud, and it sits on rollers: as Javert places it, it moves forward slightly towards Madeleine, like a pet attempting to come to its owner. It is a charming little toy. Cosette would have liked it.

He runs a finger along the elephant’s spine. “I can bring it to her,” he says, although he has been trying to keep himself from such visits.

“It’s insignificant, Monsieur le Maire.”

He cannot fathom Javert. The man is made of stone, but the elephant is softness, kindness, that he never expected, as though Javert wishes to apologize in some way for disbelieving Cosette’s existence when Fantine insisted upon it.

He places the elephant with the candlesticks. He is very careful handling it, because he suspects, somehow, that it is more precious than Javert will admit.

*

He buys a second elephant for Cosette and sends it to her in the care of the sisters. It is more lavish than Javert’s and far larger; it is meaningless.

He tells Javert she was pleased with his gift and Javert smiles.

Thaw is a dangerous thing. He does not mean to do it, to stumble again and again over the possibility of love and admiration he does not deserve.

*

But there is no convent to which he can send Javert and because he cannot rid himself of him, he allows himself to grow used to him, and it is strange how all the worst of Javert becomes a blessing when it is turned in his direction. It is strange how, seen closely, he has all the faults and crevices of a man, and is the furthest thing from stone.

“You’re too generous,” Javert says one day, after Madeleine has taken a crumbling block of houses and turned them into straighter lines of stone and brick, rented them back to their residents at a pittance. He loses money on it, but it is nothing. He is trying to buy back what he lost years ago, and that is not generosity, is selfishness that shines to those who don’t know him.

Cosette has stopped writing him from the convent. He receives monthly reports on her progress instead: she is a good girl, the sisters report, and she is faultlessly kind and sweet. She is not angry at him; she is simply forgetting him. He was a man she knew for three days four years ago. She is grateful, but she is not his daughter, and that, of course, is what he wanted. This separation.

He saves the letters with the candlesticks and the elephant. He does not know why he collects these things that rightly belong to Jean Valjean.

“I am not generous,” he says. He had, once, something to give, and he kept it. He does not know whether he kept his life and his freedom from selfishness or fear or miscalculation, the arithmetic of lives and influences, but he has come to believe that it was a mistake. And a mistake that cannot be mended: Champmathieu has been dead for two years, now, and the slate is not clean so much as it is broken. “You take me for a better man.”

“You are the finest man I know,” Javert says. He turns his head down and to the side just slightly, so all that is visible is the pink flush on his ear.

*

In his dreams, he tells Javert, _I am not the man you take me for._

And Javert says, _I am the man you take_ , and he closes the distance between them.

It is a dream that he cannot pack away, and as such, it is dangerous.

*

He visits Cosette. She is quiet and demure—not unhappy, to be sure, but she has lost the feeling of spring. She is too young to seem so autumnal. She holds her hands together on her lap and smiles at him like a painted doll.

“Have you been happy?”

“Of course, monsieur,” she says.

The word _papa_ is something else that he cannot wrap in cloth and place in the chest: it has nowhere to live but his heart, and there it stays, like a stone.

“I would like to take my vows,” she says.

He’s been written about this. He doesn’t know how to think of it. He cannot be sorry for anyone giving their life to God, but it is not the life he would have thought she would have, not when she was a little girl who wanted and hungered, who reached out to life with both hands. He does not want such self-denial for her, though he cannot say, truthfully, that he knows the woman she has become.

It hurts him to love her without knowing her.

“To surrender to God takes remarkable strength,” he says. “Most people would not be so brave.”

She smiles at him and for an instant, he sees it—the sunlight of her—and he wants to say that she is too young to promise so much. If he were her father, it would be his business to say that she should wait a little longer and see what else the world offers her in the way of love. It would be his place to say that the Lord Himself would want her to be sure that such a choice was her way to happiness; to say that God would be a light in her life even outside the convent walls, if that was what she wanted.

But what rights he had to her, he gave away. It is no surprise that she wants to devote herself to the only father she has left.

*

“Cosette would like to serve God,” he tells Javert. It is late and Javert should have been gone hours ago, but for reason, they are sitting in Madeleine’s office drinking and watching the stars through the window.

“That is a noble cause for a life,” Javert says.

“She is so young.”

“I was younger when I made my choices. You’ve said she is a serious girl.”

“She was not always so serious.”

“Children grow,” Javert says.

Madeleine looks at the sky. The darkness between the stars is as dark and as unyielding as jet. “I suspect you were always serious. I suppose even as an infant, you looked askance at the world.”

Javert makes the soft chuffing sound that it took Madeleine years to recognize as laughter. He is mildly drunk, every line of his face loosened almost beyond recognition. Madeleine finds it impossible to believe that he ever thought of him as unyielding. If he is stone, he is stone that has weathered under rain and time, stone that in places may crumble at a brush: it would be, he understands finally, so easy to break Javert.

Javert’s shoulder is warm against his. As he moves the glass to his mouth again, it’s a brush of cloth, a stroke of touch that is more intimate than it has the right to be. “No,” Javert says finally. “I had a direction to choose. I was not always one thing or another.”

Born in the gutter. That is something Javert told Valjean and but not Madeleine: he cannot know what he has never been told in this life.

“Are we one thing or another?” He asks it lightly, as though Javert’s answer does not mean everything to him, as though his life is not gathered to whatever will come next, pinned there like a rosette. Rosettes are on his mind; the failed small revolution, that utter waste of blood and life, still washes against his mind like rain against a window, streaked with gray. “Are we ourselves, ever?”

“Who else should we be?” Javert says. “We are old enough to have made our choices. Don’t fear for your girl—she has a straight path before her.”

“But there may be regret.”

“Regret is repentance of mistakes. She has made no mistakes.”

He says, “I have made mistakes.”

Javert looks at him. Javert, he thinks, can fathom neither mistakes nor regret.

“I cannot believe it,” Javert says, and he smiles. “Monsieur le Maire.”

There is a moment then where time is poised on a fulcrum. Javert is close enough to him, turned towards him, that Valjean can feel the heat from his skin and taste the alcohol on his breath. It is late and the room is dim and the empty bottles of wine on the table tell how far they have progressed, how little responsibility they would bear for whatever happens next. There is nothing to stop them. He is not the man Javert takes him for, but he is a man, and the dreams he’s dreamed over the years have never vanished with waking.

But— _Monsieur le Maire_ , Javert says. Who is he? If he accepts as Valjean what Javert is offering so carefully but so nakedly to Monsieur Madeleine, he thinks that God will never forgive him. If God remembers him at all.

It would be a kind of rape. For Javert, if he ever knew, it would be worse. It would be mockery and that, for him, would be unbearable.

He says, “It is very late.”

“Yes,” Javert says. “You must be tired.”

But he says nothing and slowly, a door closes behind Javert’s eyes, and he stands, shaking stiffness from his hands. “Of course. I have kept you too long.”

“No—”

“I’ve been careless,” Javert says. He reaches for his hat.

It is too late to say, _No_. It is too late to say, _Stay_. It is far too late to talk of love or time or names, to say that he has made incalculable mistakes in impossible circumstances, to say that he took grace without giving it, and that he is no longer certain of his forgiveness. It is too late for him and Javert, and the night sky is too dark, and when Javert goes, the click of the door is as final as the trumpets of Judgment Day. He drinks until the sun comes up but he cannot lose the memories and he cannot, cannot, cannot find peace.

*

He does not see Javert again for a month. When he does, Javert simply says that he has been reassigned.

He does not ask whether this was at Javert’s request or not. He is not a fool.

“I wish that were not so,” he says.

Javert inclines his head slightly. “You are kind, monsieur.”

“You’ve—distanced yourself. I wish that you had not.”

“I presumed,” Javert says. “You were generous, as always, to ignore it. But it is best for me to go.” There is something different about him, now: he is just as poised as he was in the earliest days of their acquaintance, but the poise has a dangerous quality to it, as though Javert is balanced on the fine edge of a razor. And whatever door Madeleine had to reach him is still closed and locked.

He risks everything: “It will be different if you stay.” They are alone—he reaches out and just misses Javert’s hand. The gap between their fingers is small but immense; it cannot be spanned. “I will be different.”

He could say everything. He could confess. Would that be redemption or further sin?

“No one is ever different,” Javert says. He does not say it unkindly—for all Javert’s faults, he is not unkind, specifically. But he is rigid, and the time to bend, the time in which it could have been different, is gone now. “You have done nothing worth the wish of it being done differently, in any case, but whatever it is that you think, you think it out of charity. You would lift up everyone.”

_I would only wish to stand side by side. To see you face to face._

He tries for what he can. If he cannot keep Javert, if he could not keep Cosette, at least he can hope that there will be life for him somewhere.

“You changed,” he says. He insists upon it. “You smiled more. Remember, please—”

“It was a dream.” Javert does not meet his eyes. “Men do not change. Not forever.”

Two silver candlesticks grown dusty in a locked trunk, a toy elephant, letters from a convent; he has turned away from so many things over the years. He has stolen love and grace and wasted it, the prodigal son who spent his inheritance foolishly. There is a man who died in Toulon with Valjean’s name shackled to his arms and legs.

“No,” Madeleine says at last. “I suppose they do not.”


End file.
